Shockwave’s Blog

One of the issues I identified shortly after starting with my current employer was the replication topology – There had been some decisions made in the past which didn’t make a great deal of sense to me and a general lack of administration meaning that redundant sites had not been removed (as an example).

Since the issues were identified I have spent a lot of time supported by colleagues and a Microsoft Gold Partner (Silversands) cleaning this up and amending the topology. We have now move to a hub/spoke topology as we have an empty forest root and three child domains (representing the three regions). To give you an idea of the carnage before and the new hub/spoke design, have a look at the diagrams below:

Before:

After:

The difference, I hope you’ll agree is night and day… We can now accurately predict replication across the group. Before these changes, I had no idea how long something would take to replicate (if ever!).

For those of you that are interested, I created these diagrams using Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer, available HERE